Endurance Prize for Palestinians: A Prize No One Should Have to Win

If an international body were to establish an award surpassing the Nobel Prize in prestige and fairness, and call it the “Endurance Prize”, the Palestinian people would undoubtedly win it. The continuous burden borne by the Palestinian people for decades is incomparable. This refers not only to Gaza, where clean drinking water is scarce, bathing has become a luxury, a single dose of pain-relieving medication is a desperate hope rather than a cure, and the death of children has become a daily reality. It also refers to a larger and continuing cruelty, one that has followed Palestinians across generations and reached into nearly every aspect of their lives.

The people of Gaza are not suffering because of a natural calamity. Nor are they trapped in a crisis that could not have been prevented. Their suffering is the result of self-serving choices made by others. The choice to bombard, besiege and starve, and the choice of much of the world to allow that suffering to continue, day and night, without end. Ceasefires come and go, failing to protect them. Humanitarian aid remains restricted. Basic necessities and urgent medical treatment are withheld from a population whose survival has been reduced to negotiation. Paradoxically, the Palestinians are repeatedly prevented from being part of the negotiations that will decide their future. 

In the West Bank, the destruction has not reached the scale of Gaza, but its people live under an increasingly pervasive form of oppression woven into the fabric of everyday life. There, anxiety touches everything. A farmer looks upon a modest field and wonders when settlers will seize it under the plans of those who call dispossession a “settlement revolution.” Parents send their children outside and fear they may not return if a soldier or settler decides to shoot. An employee who has built a life around a salary that barely meets the family’s needs wonders whether half of it will arrive this month and whether any of it will arrive the next.

A businessman waits for Israel to carry out its threats against Palestinian banks, choking the financial system on which enterprises, institutions and livelihoods depend. A labourer, driven into unemployment, watches his remaining livelihood disappear piece by piece and asks bitterly each morning how much longer he must endure. Another Palestinian may work in one city but remains unable to visit relatives in the next, even when they live in a neighbouring village, because of the unbearable harassment from Israeli soldiers at checkpoints.

Surely, the people of Palestine have been tested not only by occupation, but by the failures of the world around them. We glorify the Palestinians for their unprecedented capacity to endure occupation, violence, famine and fear. We praise their steadfastness in the face of extreme oppression and their determination to remain on their land. Yet in praising their endurance, we risk being distracted from an uncomfortable truth. Palestine is not only their test. It is one of the greatest tests of our own lifetime.

As human beings, and especially as Muslims, we have collectively failed the Palestinian people. The world can no longer claim ignorance as the suffering inflicted upon Palestinians by the Israeli occupation has entered our homes through every screen. We have seen the burnt and maimed bodies of children, the grief of parents, the destruction of hospitals and the hunger of entire families to the point of death. Yet the suffering continues, as expressions of concern and strongly worded statements can only go so far.

As Gaza approaches the third year of its horrific ordeal, it appears that the world, particularly the Islamic world, has grown accustomed to the tragedy unfolding there. Having lost the capacity to take the necessary steps to halt the bloodshed, it has settled for mere sympathy and resigned itself to a sense of helplessness. We have placed our trust in Allah without attempting to tie our camels, even though our faith commands us to confront oppression through our deeds, our words and, at the very least, our hearts. Helplessness is not neutral. It is the oppressor who benefits when those capable of resistance convince themselves that nothing can be done.

Palestinians have been made to pay a heavy price for everything. They pay the price of a permanent siege reinforced by the helplessness surrounding them on every side. They also pay the price whenever Israeli leaders need an external enemy to distract from their domestic failures. The oppression of Palestinians has become political currency for incompetent politicians seeking another seat in the Knesset, another ministry or another opportunity to prove their extremism. Again and again, Palestinians are turned into fuel for problems that are not of their making. 

When a person cannot feel secure in the most basic elements of life, when they cannot guarantee the safety of their children, the food they eat, the salary on which they depend or the home in which they sleep, then tragedy becomes comprehensive. This is the condition Palestinians under occupation experience. 

Yet there is another side to this truth. Palestinian endurance is neither passive obedience nor a willingness to accept humiliation. It is a conscious and defiant form of resistance and survival in the face of forced displacement, exile, fear and loss since 1948. Many have discovered that pain endured on one’s homeland can be easier to bear than the pain of alienation, displacement and the visible and invisible humiliations of exile. It is a truth demonstrated through generations, in those who return, in those who refuse to leave, in the crowds of students competing for seats in schools and universities inside Gaza and the occupied territories, and in the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian graduates who continue to build lives under conditions designed to make life impossible.

The occupier seeks not only Palestinian land, but Palestinian exhaustion. It waits for steadfastness to weaken, memory to fade and despair to complete what generations of facing violence could not. It also waits for the world to become distracted and for its outrage to surrender to routine. Yet every family that remains, every child who learns, every farmer who returns to his field and every home rebuilt from its ruins represents a refusal to disappear.

The Palestinians have already passed the test of endurance. They have endured far more than any people should ever be asked to endure, and they have continued to live, learn, build and resist. But will the rest of us continue to praise their endurance while offering only words? If Palestine is among the greatest tests of our lifetime, history will not judge us by how deeply we claimed to feel. It will judge us by what we did.

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The writer is Ambassador of Palestine to Bangladesh